Getting out of the car, Evie glanced back at the mailbox, her heart still not quite at its usual pace, but she saw nothing out of the ordinary. She knew that would be the case, of course, but still she needed to look. The simple act flooded her with anxiety again; the action suggesting the flash of a man she’d seen had been real. She rolled her eyes at herself, stuffed the earbuds in her ears and hit play on her iPhone; two men talked about how fireplaces work as she defiantly walked to the mailbox for the junk mail.

Time felt strange to Benjamin. It was thick and slow around him. He sensed it in a way he never had when alive; it obscured his ability to know how long he was doing something. How long had he been standing there? The sun was setting and the house began to stare back: the top floor’s two windows seemed to become eyes, the front door, a mouth. Its mundane architectural features took on the face of a challenger: What was he doing just standing there? What was his inaction preventing or reversing? There was only one direction to go. With shaking hands of dirty nails and a deep-sounding sigh that barely filled his lungs, Captain James accepted the challenge.

Evie didn’t want to turn off the TV. The house felt different, like it was alive now. Like the walls were suddenly conscious she was there, unaware it had something to do with the Civil War soldier pacing outside her front door, working up the courage to face its inside. She’d been in her grandmother’s house for a month now, since two weeks after her father died. Until this night, it had just felt like staying in someone else’s house: she bumped into furniture in the night, ran into random memories from childhood visits, spent time searching for things in the kitchen, but never had she felt uncomfortable. Not like this anyway. The feeling of suddenly not being alone had grown stronger as the hours wore on. In response, she kept the TV tuned onto light, vacuous shows choosing to ignore that she was doing it only because she thought it was somehow ghost repellant. Not that she said the word ghost to herself.

Enough, she told herself, turning off the TV. She immediately pressed play on her iPhone, starting up another podcast, this time about the economic behaviors that cause people to make bad decisions. She didn’t care about the topic so long as there was noise, preferably talking. Music could be problematic these days. She’d been avoiding quiet for a while now, but the silence was loudest in this house; it should sound like arguments and the hum of the VCR as it rewound the tapes of “Bewitched” reruns. But now the noisemakers from this house were dead or, in Emerald’s case, wracked by Alzheimer’s. Despite being a brilliant lawyer, Evie’s father left no successor power of attorney for Emerald, one of the many bizarre ways his hubris manifested itself in an otherwise self-loathing man. The only option was for Evie to be appointed Emerald’s legal guardian. That’s why she was in town, walking through Emerald’s antique-furnished house turning off lamps for bed. She walked past the front door, double-checking it was locked and tripped as she turned for the stairs.

She couldn’t see anything that would cause the stumble-- probably just the corner of the threadbare Persian rug she figured as she climbed the stairs for bed.

But she’d actually tripped on Benjamin’s boot.

He stood in the foyer; blind to the fact he’d just almost caused a woman to fall. Most people bumped into at least one ghost in their lives without realizing, Walt could tell you—random goose bumps, hair on end, faint touches, pale whispers. As many people who’ve died too soon, it was statistically impossible to think the average human didn’t smack into one every now and then.

It all looked the same to Ben: he saw whitewashed slat-wood walls. The simple but beautiful furniture, much of it made by family hands; some precious few items like the linen wardrobe made the perilous Atlantic journey some fifty years before his birth. The house seemed glad he was back, possibly surprised, but glad nonetheless—like it had been missing its occupants. Like it had missed its original identity. He didn’t care how stupid that sounded in his aching brain; anthropomorphizing a house was all the connection he had in the world and he was going to damn well hold on to it.

The familiar smell of tallow and beeswax candles, peppery burning wood, and baked fruit churned up the hunger in his guts. Noticing it for the first time since leaving his grave, Benjamin felt a deep, seething hunger that seemed to take little bites out of his stomach in desperation. Walking into the kitchen, he had no idea he actually passed through a wall closing off the original entrance when Emerald expanded the room in 1972. There sat his family’s breakfast table; it had miraculously stood in the same spot in that house since 1831. Instead of the porcelain rooster soup terrine Evie had always known to be in the center of the table, Benjamin saw biscuits wrapped in a checkered cloth, just as it had been the day he left for the war. Never had anything looked so heavenly, so perfectly exactly what he needed than those biscuits baked by his mother. He reached for them, but nothing. His hand connected with air, flashes of the rooster’s color ripped through the bread where his fingers tried to touch them. Stubbornly, Benjamin reached again, this time with both hands, which connected with the unseen soup terrine. It crashed violently to the floor.

The impossibly loud shatter startled him, popping in his ears like canon fire, engulfing him, absorbing him into a remembered battle. He fell backwards, away from the advancing Union soldiers his mind suddenly conjured all around him, backed up by smoking, belching canons. He felt the cooling blood coating warm flesh of a dead drummer boy’s ripped open chest as he scrambled back over the child’s corpse until panicked, shaking, nostrils flooded with gunfire and blood, he was cowering under the kitchen table. Clinging to the table leg like a gun, he closed his eyes against the slowly fading booming, screaming, and pops of the long-gone battle.

Evie shot up in bed. Her heart pounding so painfully hard against her chest she was terrified the sound would give her location away. She sat frozen in the dark room, ears straining for any other sound—footsteps, voices, doors—but there was nothing. Just the crash of something breaking. Grabbing her cellphone, she dialed 911 and kept her finger over the “call” button as she crept downstairs. Her eyes were wide, trying to make out anything and everything in the darkness of the house. All was still. All was quiet. All she found out of sorts was the broken rooster terrine.